* Figures provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection detail the separation of 6,022 “family units” from April 19, 2018 to August 15, 2018, according to a report published by Amnesty International on Thursday. Noting that the term “family unit” has varying applications in the U.S. immigration enforcement world — sometimes referring to individuals in a family, and other times referring to family groups containing multiple people — Amnesty observes that even on the low end, the figure reflects the largest total ever disclosed by the border enforcement agency in the context of the family separation crisis.

#STLV Stewart says he may not be the captain anymore. He may be a very different individual. Setting is 20 years past Nemesis. There are no scripts yet. It will be something very, very different. It will be made with love for the material and the fans.

* “But Tikopia is an *insanely abundant* place by the standards of space. You can breathe, for starters. The seas teem with fish. Throw a pawpaw seed in the ground and you’ll have a food tree in a few years.”

'Socialism or barbarism' is a bad slogan because 'barbarian' is just a term used by imperial extractors to denigrate the non-conforming nomadic & semi-pastoral populations outside their walls. Instead, I propose a dialectical synthesis: Barbarian Socialism

* A criminal justice expert says Avoyelles Parish law officers who wrestled a Marksville man off a tractor while serving an arrest warrant last year used too much force, needlessly escalating a confrontation that ended with the man’s death. A second expert said he doesn’t agree the officers used excessive force, but said they may have acted negligently by failing to administer aid once Armando Frank was unconscious. His crime was calmly asking what he was being charged with.

* Medieval studies groups say a major conference is trying to limit the number of diverse voices and topics. The debate is part of a bigger fight over whether medieval studies should remain a fundamentally European field. Whose Medieval Studies?

5/ And once you go on to read about the assets of the other justices—Gorsuch's net worth is in the neighborhood of $10 million, Breyer's is about $16 million—you can see what a scandal little ole' Brett, with his $15k in savings and his $200k in credit card debt, really is.

* Asylum seekers, even those who do not present themselves at points of entry, are not “illegal”; under international law they are “irregular” and subject to an array of rights and protections, including immunity from punishment.

* Mark Z. Danielewski has written a pilot for a potential House of Leaves TV series. It’s good! The question of adapting the novel wound up being a minor subtheme in our discussion of the book in my summer grad class last month, so I was gratified to actually get to see the script — and directly incorporating the novel into the storyworld of the TV series seems like an intriguing solution to the book’s basic unfilmability. I think I hope someone makes it!

So that's 50 kids matched and reunited in two weeks. At that pace we're looking at OVER TWO YEARS to match and reunite the approximately 3000 children in its custody that have been taken from their parents.

* There is too much uncertainty in sports; even if you bribe the officials, something unaccounted for could still cause the “wrong” result. It can be a bad idea to gather large crowds opposed to your team (and, by extension, your dictatorship). During Franco’s rule, Barcelona FC’s stadium was the only place the Catalans could wave their flag and sing their songs. Dictators are better off with tyranny and oppression. Football is for people who can accept a loss.

"If the study of intellectual history is to have any ultimate justification, it is its capacity to rescue the legacy of the past in order to allow us to realize the potential of the future." -Martin Jay

* But anyone with a modicum of utopian imagination should be asking, what are the opportunities secreted within this emerging network of control? When older forms of democratic possibility are being foreclosed or rendered obsolete, what new (and perhaps better) possibilities can be found? How can the emerging order, which has thus far depended so much on deliberately produced ignorance, and on keeping its political allegiances occulted, be politicised?Utopian thinking beyond Brexit.

* In their different ways, Mayer, Haffner, and Jarausch show how habituation, confusion, distraction, self-interest, fear, rationalization, and a sense of personal powerlessness make terrible things possible. They call attention to the importance of individual actions of conscience both small and large, by people who never make it into the history books. Nearly two centuries ago, James Madison warned: “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure.” Haffner offered something like a corollary, which is that the ultimate safeguard against aspiring authoritarians, and wolves of all kinds, lies in individual conscience: in “decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large.” It Can Happen Here It Happened Here 18 Months Ago.

Once when I was about three, my family accidentally boarded an skyscraper elevator without me. We were separated for no more than a few minutes. I still remember how scared I was. Anyway, Trump is a fucking monster.

this little girl is the same age as my daughter. luna is the happiest thing. the funniest girl. and she is absolutely terrified to look around and realize she is too far away from us, even for seconds. the fear she would feel here fills me with rage and sadness. pic.twitter.com/riSV8ADRFe

I don’t think anyone understands up thin the slippage is between stage 5 and stage 6. Some of the children who have been kidnapped will never be reunited with their parents. We’re already at the “disappearance” stage. It’s here. https://t.co/fb5DMyFn6Q

If your news outlet isn't referring to Trump and Sessions as white supremacists, consider why you are using politically correct language rather than accurately conveying the world as it is to your readers.